A Look Into The Past
by chrishenriqueslynn
Summary: A one shot about how stan found about the mysteries of gravity falls along with a few friends. The story is more less based on the older town of gravity falls. This is my first attempt at fanfic so a bit of R&R people :D P.S Dont own the cover photo


Here's the drill: I don't own Gravity Falls, only the story and my oc's.

For a wonderful moment Stan thought Chris was going to make it. When they had turned the corner to find the bus already at the stop Chris had burst into a run, scattering starlings and shattering puddles. The bus's engine gave a long, exasperated sigh and shrugged its way forward as if hulking its shoulders against the rain, but Stan still believed Chris would snatch success at the last minute, as always. Then, just as Chris drew level with its tail lights, the bus roared sulkily aways, its tyres leaving long streaks against the shiny wet tarmac.

Chris chased it for about twenty yards. Then, through the tiny crystal specs of rain that freckled his glasses, Stan saw his hero stumble, slow and aim a kick at the lamp post.

The bus seemed to have carried away Stan's stomach, and the last of the summer daylight. Suddenly the dingy string of shops seemed much colder, darker and more dejected than before. Stan could still taste the chocolate milkshake that had cost them their ride, and the flavour made him feel sick.

Behind him he heard Stacey's asthmatic gasping and turned to find her fumbling with her inhaler. She took a deep breath, her round eyes becoming even wider for a second so that he could see the whites all round them. She stared at Chris's slowly returning figure.

'He said…Chris said…he said that the bus was always late, he said there was time for a milkshake…I am sososososososo dead…my mum thinks I'm baby sitting…' Her pale eyebrows had climbed up her forehead in panic to hide her blonde fringe.

'Shush, Stace,' Stan said as kindly as he could. It was hopeless. Stacey was unshushable.

'But…it's all right for Chris, everyone expects him to get into trouble. I… I don't even know how to be in trouble…'

'Shush,' Stan said with more urgency. Chris was almost within earshot. Whenever Chris felt bad about something he had done he got angry with the whole world, became playfully vicious. Stan did not want to be stranded in Gravity Falls with an angry Chris.

They were not meant to be in Gravity Falls at all. Gravity Falls was an almost-place. The lurid forest that stretched away to the east were almost countryside. The sad little strings of houses, the minimart and the bike shop were almost a village. The towpath walks were almost pretty.

Someone had been knifed there, or maybe a finger with a ring had been found on one of the paths, or perhaps a strange paranormal occerence had took place there. Nobody could quite remember which, but something had happened to give the name Gravity Falls ugly edges. If gravity falls was mentioned, parents' faces stiffened as if they picked up a bad smell. It was very definitely Out of Bounds.

There was nothing much to do there, but its out-of-boundsness made it exciting. Feeding chips to jackdaws outside the boarded up Gravity Falls post office was more interesting than feeding ordinary birds in the park. So, ever since the summer holidays had started, the forbidden excursions to picnic by the Gravity Falls lake had become almost routine.

Gravity Falls was their place, but now there was nothing Stan wanted more than to be out of it.

Chris trudged back towards the others, his head bowed, the rain darkening his fierce, blonde, scrubbing brush hair. He seemed to be grimacing at his foot. Maybe he had hurt it against the lamp post. Then he looked up, and Stan saw that he was grinning.

'S'all right.' Chris shrugged and wiped off his yellow tinted sunglasses with his sleeve. 'We'll catch the next one.'

Stacey was biting her lower lip, her upper lip pulling down to a point, like a little soft beak. She was trying not to disagree, because she worshipped josh more than anybody els in the world, but words always seemed to dribble out of Stacey like water from a broken tap. 'But… we cant, that was the last bus, our return tickets wont work for the Point-to-Point bus, we haven't got enough money for new tickets for all of us… we're stuck…'

'No, we're not.' Chris said still smiling. 'I have a plan.' It was a simple plan, an odd plan, but it was a Chris plan, so it had to work.

Behind the wall of the minimart car park, there was a long tree-tangled slope that ran down to the lake side. In this wood roamed escapee supermart trolleys, stripped grass trapped in there wheels, 'sweetheart' creepers trailing from their wire frames. Chris's plan was to find one of these, take it to the minimart car park, attach it to the the chain of trolleys outside the entrance doors and reclaim the pound coin deposit in the handle slot.

Suddenly everything was an adventure again. The threesome dropped over the wall into the wood and started hunting through the trees.

It was a strange wood, stranger still now the light was fading. Stan loved it for its litter. Yellowing newspapers nestled in branch nooks, like a crop of dead leaves strangely patterned with print. A sprawling throne of rotten oak trailed dark ivy and coddled a treasure trove of crushed cans. The twigs of one wavering branch had been carefully threaded through the fingers of a red woollen mitten, so that the little tree looked as if it was waiting to grow another hand and start applauding.

'Stan, you're our eagle eyes, find us a trolley,' said Chris, and Stan felt an uncomfortable swell of pride and doubt. He was never sure if Chris was making fun of him. 'He sees everything different to us, Stace. Cos his eyes, right, they're in upside down. You just can't tell looking at them.''

Stacey gave a faint giggle, but in the darkness her dimly visible face looked uncertain. Her eyes were large and widely spaced, windows into a world full of doubt and surprise.

'It's true,' insisted Chris. 'He blinks upwards, you know. Not when you're watching. But right now, in the dark, I bet he's blinking upwards, aren't you , Stan? Stan wasn't sure how to answer, so he plunged on through the trees and pretended not to hear. Scaring Stacey was easy, and Chris seemed to find pleasure in teasing her. It was often hard for Stan to remember that Stacey was older than he was. Stan himself had been 'moved ahead' and dunked into the icy waters of secondary school a year before everyone he knew. It did not help that he was small, skinny and full of sentences that seemed fine in his head, then came out sounding over-adult and clever-clever. He had formed an alliance of desperation with Stacey. She had an air of kitten tottering helplessness, and the pallor of her hair and skin made her skin look like as if she had been through the wash too many times, losing her colour and courage in the rinse. All this made her an irresistible mark for the bullies in their class. Both Stan and Stacey had been glad to find someone willing to talk to them, even if in Stacey's case she apparently lacked the ability to stop talking.

Chris had been their salvation. He had the advantage of age – there is a world of difference between a first year and a second year – but, in any case, no bully knew what to make of Chris, with his Cheshire Cat grin and knuckleduster humor. Taunts seemed to bounce off the shields of his yellow sunglasses, leaving his attackers winded by the ricochet. He won people round somehow, as if everyone wanted in on the private joke that kept him from smirking. Chris had remembered Stan from primary school, mush to Stan's surprise and suddenly both Stan and Stacey were taken under his wings. For the last year, his friendship had protected them from the worst school-time persecutions like and invisible amulet. For all these reasons, Stan guessed that Stacey did not truly mind Chris's teasing, but he never felt comfortable joining in with it.

Usually, there were half a dozen trolleys in the little wood. This evening, however, the trolleys seemed to know that they were in danger of being taken back to captivity and had all gone into hiding. At last Stan cornered one down the lake. It was lying on its side as if it had fallen in its hurry to get away and been unable to get back on its wheels. The three of them dragged it over the to the wall, feeling the trolley catch at every bramble and tussock, trying to jolt itself out of their grasp.

It was only when they reached the car-park wall that they started to see a small flaw in Chris's plan. The ground on the woodland side of the wall was much lower than it was on the car-park side. They'd scrambled up and down the wall themselves so often that they no longer noticed how high it was. Now they stared sadly at the trolley, then up at the wall, which loomed above and laughed at them.

'We can do this.' Chris said after a moment. "S just mechanics, that's all.'

Following Chris's new plan, the three scavenged materials for a makeshift rope – a loose flapping of plastic cordon tape, a mouldering abandoned T –shirt, a length of wire. These were knotted together, and one end tied firmly to the trolley. The other end was thrown over a low branch, and Stacey and Stan grabbed it as it tumbled down on the other side. Chris who was by far the strongest of the three, clambered up on to the wall and waited to grab the trolley when Stacey and Stan had hauled it high enough.

This cant work, thought Stan as he started to pull on the 'rope'. But then the trolley raised its handle-end, swung to and fro, and took to the air. The plan was working.

The flight of the trolley was a beautiful thing to see. It bucked repeatedly against the tree trunk, and its wheels left dark scars across the lichen, but it rose, a few inches at a time. Then just as it was almost within reach of Chris's fingertips, it bumped up against one of the lower boughs and half disappeared among the leaves. They tugged and tugged, and the foliage shivered and shook, spilling sleeping raindrops on to their upturned faces. But a thin branch had pushed its way up under the trolley's blue plastic child seat and would not budge.

At last Stan and Stacey stopped tugging. They stood sucking their burned palms and stared up at the triumphant trolley.

'I think…' began Stacey, tumbling helplessly into the silence, 'I think if we sort of stuck a stick up under that wheel and levered it, swayed it to and fro, then it might…'

'It's stuck,' said Chris. They had all known this in their souls, but Chris saying so made it true. Chris's tinted sunglasses had dulled with the setting of the sun, and behind them Stan could see the pale flicker of eyelids as he blinked twice and narrowed his eyes. He was biting both lips together so they were quite hidden – a bad sign with Chris.

Without another word, Chris dropped from the wall and strode away down the slope towards the lake. Stan and Stacey exchanged a look and then followed. _He's not going to run off and leave us, is he_?... but what did Chris have to lose if he went home late? Being in trouble meant something different in Chris's home and sometimes Chris seemed to have no fear of that anyway. Stan caught up with him.

'Where are we going?' he tried.

'The well.' Chris sounded too calm.

They followed Chris's ruthless pace, struggling through dead-nettles and ducking the drooping purple fingers of the buddleia, until they reached the moss covered steps that lead down the to the lake and path. Trainers sliding against the wet slat of the steps, they descended until the glitter of the lake was just visible through the tree; then Chris stopped. To one side of the steps was a small dimple in the ground, and at the bottom of the dimple was a stark ring of concrete, with a wire mesh covering the hole in the middle. Several crisp packets had been pushed through the wire and stuck in the mesh. Chris got down on his hands and knees. Only when he got out his swiss knife and pulled free the screwdriver attachment did Stan realise what he was doing. Soon Chris had unscrewed three of the bolts fastening the well cover in place and was starting on the fourth.

'It's a wishing well, isn't it?' Chris explained, continuing to wrestle with the rusty bolts. 'And that means coins. Got it!' The wire mesh came away. 'All right, who's going down?' Stacey, you're thin and wriggly. Want to go?'

Stacey's only answer was a thin squeak of alarm. Chris grinned at her. 'All right then.' He swung his legs over the edge and, to the others' dismay, started to lower himself in.

'Chris, look, um …' began Stan. He exchanged a worried glance with Stacey as Chris disappeared into blackness.

'Chris, what if you get stuck? Shouldn't we make another rope and tie it round your chest cos-'

A sharp cry echoed in the darkness below them. 'Chris!' squealed Stacey. She threw herself on to her hands and knees beside the well and stared down into the murk, her pale hair falling around her face.

'It stinks down here!' Chris called up suddenly.

'Chris, you scared us!' Stacey's nervousness melted helplessly into giggles.

'That's right, you go ahead and laugh. Here I am…'

Chris's echoing tones were interrupted by a sudden splash. ' Darn it.'

Stacey peered quickly into the well again. 'I think he's fallen in,' she managed through her laughter. 'I can hear splashing.'

'Can't be that deep then,' whispered Stan. He was pretty sure that if Chris was drowning he would be spending more time screaming and less time swearing under his breath.

'Right, I've got some,' they heard at last. The well's echo gave Chris's voice a solemn and impressive sound. 'Coming up.' Chris whistled to himself as he started to climb, the tune interrupted now and then by the scrape and splash of dislodged masonry. At long last he reappeared and clambered out. He shook one leg then the other, trying to dance the water out of his trainers. Even in the dusk light, however, it was obvious that his trainers were the least of his problems.

Stacey fumbled a small white something out of her pocket. She looked at it, and then at the sodden wreckage of Chris's clothes, and her shoulders began to shake uncontrollably.

'I've got a tissue!' she squeaked, and somehow this was much funnier than it should have been.

Five minutes later they were running down Gravity Falls's high street just in time to catch the last bus. Open-mouthed, the driver looked at the green that slicked Chris's hair and smudged is sunglasses, took in his clothes, dark and clinging with water from the waist down, contemplated the slimy puddle of blackened coins in Chris's outstretched hand.

'You just pulled all that lot out of the well, didn't you?'

'No,' said Chris, with his best brash, unblinking stare.

It was the total shamelessness of this lie that seemed to throw the driver off balance. He gave Chris a long look, as if to say that he wasn't fooled, that he'd be watching him. Then he jabbed at a few buttons on his ticket machine and a loop of three tickets curled into Chris's waiting hand.

Chris sauntered to the back of the bus and waited while Stacey spread the seat with newspapers for him, then settled himself with a grin, as if he would face no inquisition when he reached home, half-drowned, with rust under his finger nails.

_He did it_. At that moment Stan would willingly have taken a bullet for Chris. He would have followed him over deserts or waded across snake infested rivers for him. Stan hugged the surge of feeling, as Stacey talked and Chris wiped his sunglasses with her tissue. Suddenly he wanted to face some great danger or difficulty and prove himself to his hero in turn, and he was so full of the wish that it seemed it might split him like a conker shell.

If Stan had known as much about wishes then as he came to know later, he would have been a lot more careful with his thoughts.

* * *

><p><strong>Sorry 'bout the cliffhanger :3 .. . . . . Anyways what did you think about the story so far? Would appreciate a bit of R&amp;R, and should I continue this?<strong>

**Hope you enjoyed reading it so far. Sorry 'bout the slow pace and lack of action though, I dont have a creative imagination yet :p**


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